


If the Seas Catch Fire

by goldfinch



Category: The Red Road (TV 2014)
Genre: Courtroom Drama, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Minor Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-08 14:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11083872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: There are stars out now, and the intermittent wail of sirens coming in sounds somehow more lonely. Though her hands are clean, Rachel keeps looking down expecting to see blood.





	If the Seas Catch Fire

It’s been a full two hours since Junior got out of surgery, and they still won’t let Rachel in to see him. It’s late, now. There are stars out, and the intermittent wail of sirens coming in sounds somehow more lonely, and though her hands are clean, she keeps looking down expecting to see blood. Junior’s blood. Her grandfather’s blood. She was already in her pajamas when her dad called her to say what happened. She’s in jeans and a coat now, but the road was dark, and it’s late, and on the way here she had to pull over because she thought she was going to throw up. Shot. The chief, too. And something about Kopus she hadn’t quite heard over the roar in her ears.

“Please,” she says to the woman at the desk. “I’m his _girlfriend_.”

“I’m sorry. Family only.”

Rachel closes her eyes briefly, and feels the words sharpen in her mouth before she says them. “Listen, my father is Captain Jensen of the Walpole Police. You know him? Let me in to see Junior right now or I swear to god, I’ll get you fired so fast your head’ll spin.” It’s like spitting out nails. It still doesn’t get her what she wants. The woman raises one sculpted eyebrow. Then she shakes her head.

After Rachel’s retreated to the row of chairs in the waiting room, she stands there for a moment and just breathes. She can see the car in the parking lot, waiting for her, but she doesn’t want to go home. And if she can’t be here with Junior, she doesn’t know where else to go.

“You’re starting to sound an awful lot like your dad.”

Rachel whirls. Kopus is standing in the hallway behind her, his posture a little awkward, like he’s trying to hold something in. His shirt is bloody, but it’s soaked-in blood, old, dark and featureless as a Rorschach print. Rachel doesn’t know how long he’s been there, but it’s been long enough if he heard what she said to that nurse.

“It’s better than sounding like my mother."

“I guess.” He glances over his shoulder, into the restricted areas of the hospital. Doctor’s offices and the ICU, and somewhere between them the room in which they cut her boyfriend open enough to save him, then sewed him back together. Rachel’s been waiting for over an hour; how long has Kopus been here? “You here for Junior?” he asks, looking back at her.

“Yeah. They won’t let me in, though.”

He nods. “Well, it’s pretty boring anyway. Nothing to do but watch him sleep.”

“You saw him?”

“It was mostly what I came for. Well, that and—” He makes a gesture toward his shoulder that she doesn’t understand. The fluorescents are bright, but she still can’t see what he’s pointing at. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just the wreck of his body, the shape of him bigger and more powerful than anyone else she knows, but still exhausted-looking.

“It’s sorta like when he was in juvie,” Rachel says after a moment. “I can’t call him, can’t visit….”

If Kopus were anyone else, he’d take her in to see Junior anyway. He doesn’t. He just stands there, looking at her, and eventually he looks away. “Well,” he says. “I’ll see you around.” He walks across the tiny lobby space and straight past her, and there’s this slipping moment where she looks at him and sees Junior. Her mother said Junior was more like Kopus than Rachel’s dad, if he was like anyone at all. He’d always be in trouble. Rachel doesn’t want to be alone right now, and she doesn’t want to be with her parents. She reaches out as Kopus goes past her.

“Wait.” She just grazes his arm, but he stops and turns toward her, eyebrow raised. “Can you… can we—go somewhere? Somewhere else?”

He looks at her. She gets the feeling that he’s not really even considering it, just that it takes a while for what she said to register. After a moment he shrugs and tells her he’s driving.

The inside of his truck is surprisingly clean, although there’s a dark stain on the seat near the driver’s-side headrest that she doesn’t sit too closely to. There’s no garbage lying in the footwell, although there are some water bottles stuffed into the doors’ side pockets. One of them looks unopened.

“You can have one of those if you want,” Kopus says, sliding into the driver’s seat and pulling the door shut behind him. Suddenly, the car feels much smaller.

“Oh, no thanks.” She lifts her own aluminum bottle, attached with a climber’s clip to her bag. Kopus makes a flat _huh_ sound. Then he starts the car.

“So where to?” he asks, throwing a his right arm arm across the seat as he backs the car out. The parking lot is almost empty, and they’re the only car in it that’s moving. Kopus doesn’t even bother stopping at the exit, though he does slow down to let a car go by before he pulls out into the sparse traffic. Rachel watches the red taillights recede ahead of them and thinks of ambulance lights, and the blood on Kopus’s shirt, and how Junior’s bed on the mountain smelled like roasted meat and woodsmoke from the campfire. The mountain. The forests.

“Can we go to the lake?” she asks.

The glance Kopus gives her is a quick, skeptical thing, his eyes dark even in the glare of the streetlamp through the windshield. “Sure,” he says.

Rachel’s come up the mountain more times than she can count to visit Junior; she knows this certain bend in the road, and the first house on the reservation, a white building with an old RV out front. In the dark, though, everything looks different. By the time Kopus pulls to a stop at the lakeshore, Rachel barely recognizes anything at all. When she came here the day she first met Kopus, she’d only been up on the mountain a few times before, mostly for parties or to meet with Junior. It looks as strange to her now as it did then.

The engine cuts off, and suddenly everything is silent. 

It’s going to be fall again soon. The leaves are already starting to turn. She has to wear a jacket in the evenings and in the mountains, now, and soon there’s going to be snow. She thinks of Junior’s makeshift tent out here, the squirrels he hunted and skinned. He learned that from one of his books, probably, though not the one with the pictures of scalpings, and people tied hand-and-foot to posts, people burning and dying. Junior’s people. He’s not going to stay up here through winter though, not with his injury, not with what happened to him and to Mrs. Van Der Veen.

Rachel glances at Kopus in the driver’s seat. He hasn’t said a word the whole way here. She didn’t see it before, in the too-bright fluorescents, but something in his face looks different. Poised on an edge, somehow. She’s never seen him cry but she thinks that might be what he’s starting up to do.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “my dad didn’t say—the chief, your guys’ mom, is she….”

He shakes his head. “She’s hanging in there. But just barely.”

Another apology is inadequate, but it’s all she has to offer. He lowers his head in what might be a nod, but doesn’t say anything. The night is quiet, both inside the car and out. Through the windshield, in the sky, she can make out the spindly, upside-down W of Cassiopeia, tied to the rocks.

“Junior said you came to get him in Connecticut,” she says, after a long silence.

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

Kopus sighs, as though a hundred people have already asked him that question. “Couldn’t let him kill his dad, s’all. Kid needs better than prison, especially if you’re gonna stick with him.” He looks at her, like he’s daring her to say otherwise, but she shakes her head and looks out over the water. It seems so long ago now, those first days she knew him. The water was so cold when they went swimming that, after a few minutes, she felt almost warm.

“I think it’s more that he’s going to stick with me,” she says. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just, I’m probably gonna get what my mom has.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, well. Maybe you’ll go to college and find a cure. Didn’t you want to be a psychiatrist or psychologist or something?”

Now, how did he find that out? Theirs is a small town, but not _that_ small. It’s not like those picturesque English villages where everyone knows everyone else’s business, even if sometimes it seems like they do, here. It was probably her dad. Sometimes he and Kopus are almost, for some unfathomable reason, friends—but they must be closer than Rachel thought if her dad’s talking to him about her. She still shakes her head. “I’m not going to college.”

The look he gives her is casual enough, but narrow. “Why not? You need money?” Somehow, the question is a test.

“No, it’s not that. I just… I know what I have, here. Once Junior gets better, we can get married and settle down, and I’ll know I won’t ever be alone.”

“Jesus.” Kopus looks out over the water, a distant, careless look. “Junior’s great but, honey, no one’s worth staking your life on. You don’t even know if you’re gonna get what your mom’s got or not.”

“That’s what she said too.”

“Yeah, well. She’s a smart lady.” He doesn’t sound the way she thought he’d sound though, saying that. He just sounds bitter. The afternoon he found her at Junior’s camp, and she yelled in his face that he was pathetic, to have held onto the memory of her mother all these years, he only shook his head and laughed. She’s not sure, now, how he feels about her mom. Is it bitterness that her mom didn’t stay with him, or bitterness at the various ways in which her family has both ruined and saved his life?

“You… when you and my mom were younger, did you—did you ever think….”

“We could be together?” He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe. Who knows what kind of shit I was thinking back then.” He pulls a flask from under the seat of the car, and Rachel eyes it for a moment, then turns back to the lake.

“Can I have some of that,” she asks, voice flat. She doesn’t look, but she feels the smooth leather over the flask when Kopus hands it to her. The whiskey cuts a warm trail down her throat; it tastes like smoke and burning things, like fire on the mountain. It helps a little. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, then returns the flask.

“Junior’s gonna make it, you know,” Kopus says.

“I know. It’s not that. Well—it is that, but it’s other things too.”

“What kinda other things.”

“Just stuff. Family stuff.”

She feels him shift in the driver’s seat, hears the gentle thud when he drops his head back against the cab. “You know you’ve gotta tell me now, right? You can’t say something like that and then leave me hanging.” He snorts softly then says, under his breath, “Stuff.”

It’s not even that she has to tell him, specifically, though—it’s just that she has to tell _someone_. Someone who isn’t her mother, who both knows and doesn’t know already; someone who isn’t her father, who would be obligated to do something about it. Junior would be first on her list, but he’s lying in a hospital bed miles away, and Kopus is the next best thing. He’s killed people, and he’s done other illegal stuff; if anyone would keep their mouth shut if she opens hers, it’s Kopus.

“My grandpa died a couple days ago,” she say slowly, staring at her hands and then at the dashboard and then, finally, at him. “He didn’t have a heart attack like they said—or, he _did_ , the autopsy said he did, but he only had it because someone was strangling him to death at the time.”

One of Kopus’s eyebrows goes up, a skeptical look Rachel doesn’t know quite how to interpret. Does he want her to elaborate? Does he not believe her? But all he says, in the end, is: “You?”

She shakes her head. “No. My mom.”

Unexpectedly, he starts to laugh, so hard he has to lean over the steering wheel to calm himself down. When it has passed he takes another long swig from the flask and settles back into the leather seat. “Damn,” he says after while. “Her body count might rival mine, one day, she keeps going at this rate.”

“Junior said that kid you killed when you when you were little was an accident.”

“That boy can’t keep a secret to save his life, can he.” Kopus takes another swallow from the flask, but he doesn’t seem too angry, or even surprised. Just tired. “Yeah,” he says. “It was an accident. The ones since have mostly been self defense.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“None of your business.” His face doesn’t change, though; he doesn’t even look annoyed. He just stares out at the water for a moment, then shakes his head. “And what’d you do?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I took stuff from the room to make it look… better. I don’t know. To make it look less like a murder scene. She didn’t ask me to do it,” Rachel adds quickly, “I just did. I don’t think she was… herself. When it happened, I mean. I found her sitting out under one of the trees in their backyard like, _hours_ later, and she didn’t even realize what she’d done until I brought her in and showed her. I couldn’t—I _had_ to.”

“Hey, I ain’t judging you,” Kopus says. And he isn’t. When he looks at her his face is calm enough; they could be talking about the weather, rather than the murders they’ve committed or covered up, and for some reason that’s comforting. It’s like the EMTs who ask your name and tell you everything’s going to be okay even as you’re bleeding out. It makes things seem not as bad. After a minute or so, Kopus passes the flask back over, and Rachel has another mouthful, and then they just sit there in the truck, staring out at the water and the sky. Every now and then she hears Kopus swallow, but it must be at least fifteen minutes before she holds out her hand for the flask and finds it empty. She drops it onto the seat, and the silent moments that follow feel like an end. Kopus must feel it too, because he eventually clears his throat, then reaches for the keys still dangling from the ignition, silver and shining in the moonlight.

“Back to the hospital?” he asks.

“Can you… just drop me off at home, actually? I don’t really want to drive right now.”

“Sure.”

The ride out is as quiet as the ride in, just the road under the tires and the engine and sometimes branches scraping up against the cab. Kopus finished off the flask more or less on his own, but his hands are steady on the wheel, and the car doesn’t drift too badly. Anyway, the roads are empty, this time of night. There’s no one out on it to hit—not even children.

 

 

She drives out to bring Junior home from the hospital later that week. Junior calls her to ask her to do it, because Kopus is too drunk and there isn’t anyone else, he says.

“You mom’s not coming home too?” Rachel asks, pressing the phone against her shoulder as she rummages for the keys. There’s a silence on the other end of the line. A long silence. It goes on and on in a choked sort of suspension, and Rachel knows it can only mean one thing. “Oh,” she breathes. “Junior, I’m so sorry. No one said—I thought she was hanging on. When did it happen?”

“Just this morning. She survived the surgery, but slipped into a coma.” It’s obvious, even over the phone, that he’s fighting back tears. She can hear the ragged tremble of his breathing, the strange, wet edge to his words. “This morning, they told me she just… went. 5:00 a.m. or so. No one was with her, not even one of the nurses. Fucking no one.”

Well, 5:00 a.m. What do you expect? But that would be the worst thing to say to Junior right now, so Rachel says she’s sorry. She’s sorry, she’s so sorry, of course she’ll come pick him up.

She spends the drive over thinking about Junior’s mom, that way she always looked at Rachel when she came by, with a mix of fondness, exasperation, and worry. She’d approved of them being together, although Rachel had really only had a couple conversations with her in all the years she was seeing Junior. It wasn’t like with her dad and Junior, or her mom and Junior, which was even worse. Rachel always thought her mother would like Ms. Van der Veen. Now she would never know for sure.

Junior doesn’t say anything when she arrives at the hospital. A nurse hovers for a minute or two, but going by the look on Junior’s face the woman might as well be a mosquito he’s been told he isn’t allowed to kill, and so must suffer through. He doesn’t say anything when Rachel helps him into the car, either, or when they pull out of the parking lot, but when they’re stopped at a red light two blocks away he reaches over and takes her hand.

It’s warm but very dry, almost feverish.

“Junior….”

“You seen Kopus?” he asks quickly.

“The night you were shot, at the hospital. They wouldn’t let me in to see you, but he told me you were doing okay. I mean. You know. He told me you were going to live.”

“I can’t go back to the house,” he says. It’s so quiet it’s almost a whisper. He’s staring straight ahead, through the windshield and the light, which has just gone red again. He doesn’t mention the mountain, the burnt-out tent he was so set on turning into a home. It’s not an option anymore.

Rachel says, “I can ask my dad if—”

“No, I…. No.” Junior doesn’t shake his head; he just closes his eyes. “I’ll stay with Kopus.”

“…You sure?”

He nods. So when the light goes green again, Rachel pulls forward. She turns up the mountain, into the deeper forest, where the town thins out and soon it’s just houses and the occasional shop, and air smells like pine and cedar and paint sludge. The reservation. “Turn here,” Junior says, and it occurs to Rachel that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She was heading for Kopus’s old house, but he’s moved—her dad said so. So she turns where Junior says, and follows the rest of his directions too; soon they’re pulling up a long, steep driveway she doesn’t recognize. The house is small and rundown-looking, with dead tulips in the flowerbeds and an ill-watered lawn. She can’t imagine Kopus ever having planted tulips.

“This is where he lives?” she asks as she pulls the parking brake.

Junior nods. “Can you—the car’s pretty high, I mean.” He doesn’t look at her when he says it.

“Oh, yeah.” She clambers out, tucking her hair self-consciously behind her ear as she comes around the front of the truck. Junior’s body is warm, like his hand was, and he weighs less than she thought he would. Probably all those weeks on the mountain, eating only what he could catch himself. Once he’s down, though, he disentangles himself and begins limping toward the house with dim, flat-eyed determination. She doesn’t know what drugs they gave him at the hospital, but they’re clearly wearing off.

They stand at the door for a long time. Or Rachel does, anyway; Junior leans, half sitting, against the railing, one hand clenched around his side. She can’t see his bandages beneath his tank top but she can see the injury in the way he’s holding his body: carefully, like he’s ready to fold at any moment. Maybe they should have gotten a wheelchair. Rachel moves closer, lifts an arm toward him. “Here,” she says, “do you want to—”

The door opens.

Her arm drops, and she turns to see Kopus standing—swaying—in the doorway. He’s in a white t-shirt but his face is dark and indistinct behind the screen. He is very obviously drunk. But those eyes—she can see the heat of them, unfocused and dull. There’s a long moment where she and Junior stare at him in twinned uncertainty, and then Kopus turns and pitches back into the darkness of the house. “Come in f’yer comin’ in.” Rachel stretches out a hand toward Junior, and he takes it.

The house is not like Kopus’s old one, and she knows immediately that it isn’t his. Or, that it wasn’t until very recently. There’s wallpaper, and too many shelves, and the air smells like dust and Febreeze and it’s cold, autumn cold. The couch is upholstered in light floral. They make their way through the living room to the kitchen, where Junior lowers himself into a chair and Rachel eyes the clutter of empty beer bottles on the counter. It’s true that Junior doesn’t have a lot of options right now, but she doesn’t feel right about leaving him _here_ , where there’s no one to help him tape himself up for the shower, or make sure he takes his pills with food, or make sure he takes his pills. Kopus has his head in the refrigerator and is bringing up another bottle of beer.

“You wan’ one?” he asks, turning to look at her.

“No thanks.”

He shrugs, shuts the refrigerator door. “I’d offer you one too, Junior but—” he pops the cap off “—you look like you’re prob’ly on drugs.”

Junior doesn’t nod, but he does say the name of the pills in his prescription bottle; Kopus’s whole face looks impressed.

“You could get good money for those.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Kopus stares at him. Sways, then grabs at the counter to steady himself.

Silence.

Then: “The fuck you doing here, June?” It’s a nickname Rachel’s never heard anyone but Mrs. Van der Deen call Junior, a childish, affectionate name that makes Rachel think of summer, and long weekends at the lake catching tadpoles, and a younger version of Junior, a boy she never knew, with knobby knees and perpetually unbrushed hair. But then, Kopus knew him when he was actually that young. They lived in the same house for a while, Junior told her, before Kopus went to prison the first time. Junior had been happy then, or maybe oblivious. When he talks about those years now it’s mostly with bitterness—about his father, about Kopus’s father, about how so much he used to have was pulled out from under him. It’s a feeling Rachel can relate to.

Now Junior shrugs, awkward and visibly in pain. “Thought I’d stay here for a while,” he mumbles. “Mom’s house… I mean, I….”

Kopus stares at him. Rachel thinks he wasn’t listening, or didn’t hear, until he tilts his head back and swallows down the other half his beer. When he’s finished, he wipes his mouth and says, “I guess you c’n sleep on the couch. ‘F you don’t mind the flowers. Just don’t touch my alcohol.” Then he turns, and heads off down the hallway; halfway there he lets out a very loud burp.

She hears him banging things around in his room, the door cracked, light spilling out into the hallway. It’s not lamplight. It looks like sunlight, bright and pure. Kopus won’t let Junior actually die—Rachel knows that. But still. “Are you sure you don’t want me ask my dad?” She shakes out Junior’s pills, counts them out and hands them over.  
   
Junior looks at her, dead-eyed and tired. “Yeah. I know he kinda saved my life but that doesn’t mean I’m cool, like, eating at his table or whatever.” 

Of course he’s already eaten at her dad’s table, but she doesn’t say so. Her dad wasn’t there then, and that’s not what Junior means, and Rachel’s too emotionally drained to be a bitch.  
   
Kopus never comes back out of his room, and when Rachel leaves Junior is passed out on the couch, fuzzy and a little bit high from the pills. He smiles at her, just a little, and then he’s asleep.

And then she’s gone.

 

 

She sees him a couple times a week after that, but always at some neutral location: the diner, the high school, the forest—never his mother’s house, never Kopus’s house again, never hers. Their relationship feels suddenly illicit again, like that summer spent in that old warehouse or beneath the trees near the railroad tracks. Except the weather’s finally turned, and they have to sit in the car most days, with the heater running and their sides pressed tightly together, Junior’s hand in hers. They don’t have sex. Junior doesn’t seem interested, and she doesn’t want to push him.

He says he’s doing fine, when she asks, but that’s obviously a lie. Aside from what happened with his father, with Mrs. Van der Deen, with Kopus, there’s all the legal stuff going on with the tribe and the city and the paint sludge dumped into the mines. It’s made national news, and there are reporters hanging around town now, though they never seem interested in her or Junior.

“One of them came to Kopus’s house the other day,” Junior tells her one afternoon, hunched over his plate of fries at the diner. “He ran him off pretty quick though. I don’t think he’ll be back.”

“Why would they come to Kopus?”

Junior shrugs. “He’s been getting involved in the trial stuff. With Sky. The new chief,” he adds, when Rachel gives him a blank look. “When my mom…. The tribe named her a couple days after. They didn’t get along, her and my mom but… I dunno. Kopus says she’s what the tribe needs right now.”

“What do you think?”

“I mean, she cares? And I think… I think she wants to fight. So I dunno. Maybe he’s right.” He’s not looking at her again, just staring down at his fries, stirring them idly with his fingers. He’s eaten maybe three bites of food since they sat down—because, he says, of the drugs he’s still on. They make him unhungry, and it’s starting to show. The sharper edges of his face, the fine bones of his wrists. Once this topic of conversation would have lit him up with anger and conviction; now he’s sluggish and hollow, like just the skin of a person. Rachel reaches across the table and puts her hand on his, to make him look at her. 

“What,” he says.

“I just… I think you should talk to someone.”

Junior shakes his head. “Some FBI guy already came by. And tribal police. Who’s there left to talk to?”

“No, I mean like—a psychiatrist. Or something.”

“I talk to you,” he says bullishly, immediately defensive. She thinks he’s going to pull his hand away, but he doesn’t, though she can feel him wanting to. The minute twitches of his fingers as he stills them. “I shouldn’t have to talk to anyone else.”

“But I’m not—objective.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t need to talk to anyone.”

The plainness of the sentence— _anyone_ —makes her think of his shelter on the mountain that summer. The blankets spread over the grass, nothing but birdsong and wind and coyotes howling to one another in the night. The shining dark of a deer’s eye, turned to face her. He hadn’t been lonely then, but he’s lonely now, even though she’s sitting right in front of him. “Except me,” she says.

Junior shrugs, mulish, but agreeing. It was what he said before.

“So talk to me about your mom,” she says, and watches his head snap toward her.

“I didn’t—that doesn’t mean I wanna—”

“No,” she agrees. “It means you have to.” She can sit here and hold Junior’s hand and make him talk or lose him. Those are the choices. Letting him die is just as good as killing him, and she has enough blood on her conscience. She feels the bones of his hand shift and rearrange themselves beneath her fingers, but he’s still not looking her in the eye.

“I don’t mean to make you mad,” she says. “It’s just—I don’t want to have to watch you slip away from me. I can see you giving up, Junior; I’m not blind. And I know things really suck right now, but they’ll get better. I promise.”

“What the fuck do you know,” he snaps. His hand is hot and when he pulls it from hers, Rachel flinches. “Things were bad a few months ago, when Mac died. Since then things have only gotten fucking worse.” He glares out the window, then at her, and then he’s sliding out of the booth and dragging his jacket on, and not looking back as he leaves. Rachel stares after him, caught completely off guard. She shouldn’t be. She knows how he can be. But she’s surprised anyway.

Junior tears out of the parking lot on the quad, taking the turn so sharply that the tires squeal a little on the blacktop. And then he’s gone.

After what seems like a very long time, the waitress comes over to refill Rachel’s coffee. She pauses a little afterward, delicately, lingering, and when Rachel glances up, the woman smiles. “Hey honey,” she says gently. “Did you want the check?”

 

 

Two days later she goes to see him, but Kopus opens the door instead.

He’s sober, but by the way he squints in the sunlight it’s clear that that’s a fairly recent development. “Rachel,” he says, and then, after a moment, sighs, and lets her in.

The house is dark and cool, and this time smells more of spices and beer than dust and floral perfume. There’s a leather jacket thrown over the back of the couch that Rachel recognizes, and smoothes her fingers over as she goes past.

“He’s not here,” Kopus says, glancing back. Rachel pulls her hand guiltily from the jacket.

“Where is he?”

Kopus shrugs. “Dunno. I ain’t his keeper. Beer?”

She surprises herself by saying yes, and Kopus pops the cap off one before he hands her the bottle. He sucks down half of his in one go, then just sort of stands there, looking at the bottle, at her, at nothing. Rachel peels away a corner of the beer label with the edge of her fingernail.

“I never told you,” she says eventually, “how sorry I am about your mom. Junior he—he said what happened.”

“Yeah….” Kopus looks at her, and she realizes how tired he must be. The light isn’t good and she can’t see his expression properly, the way his head is turned, but he obviously hasn’t been sleeping enough. He reminds her so much of Junior sometimes, except his self-destructive gestures tend to be less flashy, with more purposeful intent. Less abandoning society to go live on a mountaintop like a hermit, more drinking to death in the dark. Except there are papers spread across the kitchen table, official-looking documents, and she remembers what Junior said about Kopus getting involved in the trial.

“How’s that going?” she asks, tilting her head toward the papers.

Kopus shrugs. “Fucking slow, mostly. Corporate crime’s not… it’s a lot more complicated than straight up criminal law.”

“You are getting involved, then. Junior mentioned it, but I didn’t….”

“Yeah. I didn’t really see it coming either.”

And yet. She remembers what Junior telling him about that day Kopus’s father came to the house, the way Kopus got in between his father and everyone else. Junior fired the gun, but Kopus was willing to take a bullet. It makes sense.

There’s a low roar outside, distant but getting closer, and when it’s close enough Rachel recognizes the quad’s engine.

“That’ll be him,” Kopus says dryly, tilting the bottle back again.

Sure enough, Junior stomps up the front steps and through the door less than a minute later, his helmut under one arm and his hair sticking up like a porcupine. He closes the door, looks up, sees her—and stops dead. His eyes go from her to Kopus and back again, then to the beer in her hand, and such a strange look comes over his face that Rachel almost flinches. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

Her hand tightens around the neck of the bottle, and she sits up a little straighter on the back of the couch. “I came to see you,” she says. His face seizes up oddly, but he holds her gaze and that, to Rachel, seems like progress. “We need to talk.”

 

 

The hearing happens on a Thursday afternoon, probably to discourage people from attending. It doesn’t work. A lot of the businesses are shut down as they drive to the courthouse, everyone closing up for a couple hours; she sees a few people walking over, even. There aren’t enough places to park—her dad takes one of the reserved police spaces, but other cars are still circling when they head in. The lobby, too, is full. They slip through the crowd, shouldering through people and saying excuse me, and then they’re in. The courtroom isn’t much better.

She’s looking for Junior but it’s Kopus she sees first, broad-shouldered, taller than everyone else in the room by a head even when they’re all sitting down. There’s a baby on his lap. Rachel has to stare at it for a moment before she actually realizes what she’s looking at, and by then he’s seen her. Or maybe he’s looking at her dad. He lifts his chin in a brief nod, then turns back to the front of the courtroom. He isn’t paying the baby much attention. He isn’t paying the bench much attention either. The baby squirms and fusses, and it’s Junior, beside him, who finally holds out his hands and takes the baby to settle it. They’re sitting in the first row, just behind the prosecutor’s bench. The woman in front of them, a Lanape woman with New York hair and turquoise beads around her neck, who Rachel recognizes from the news, keeps turning around to talk to Kopus.

“Rachel.” Her dad leads her down one of the benches a few rows back, but on the same side of the aisle, to two spaces between an elderly Lanape woman and a man a little younger than Kopus, who gives her dad an ugly look. “Hey, I’m on your guys’ side in this, alright?” her dad says, holding up his hands.

“Sure you are.” The man’s on his feet now, blocking the seats. “You people’ve given us nothing but grief.”

“Look, I’m the one who found the photo. I just want to set things right.”

The guy shakes his head. He’s got a tattoo of a bird hunched up on his bare shoulder, and the look on his face hasn’t changed. “Get on your side of the courthouse before I make you.”

One of the courthouse security guards is starting to make his way toward then, but it’s Kopus’s voice that makes the man back down. “There’s plenty of room on the other side, _Officer._ ” Rachel jumps. The way he drawled _Officer_ , it was clearly more of an insult than a title, but he’s also standing at the end of the aisle, close enough to her that she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to. He looks at her dad, then at her.

Her dad says, “Look, I just—”

“You looking to start a fight before things even get started? Keep going on about that damn picture and you will.”

Her dad’s mouth goes tight, and although he steps back down the aisle to leave, he says something very quiet and angry to Kopus as he passes. Whatever it is, Rachel doesn’t hear it, but Kopus just rolls his eyes. When Rachel steps out of the aisle, he tilts his head back toward Junior. “You can stay if you want,” he says. “Junior’ll pitch a fit if I make you sit with your dad.”

Rachel looks up the rows in time to catch Junior’s eye. Then she looks back toward her dad, sitting stiffly down on a bench on the opposite side, then back at Junior. “You sure?”

“Where’s that girl who jumped in a freezing lake the first day I met her?” Kopus asks, and there’s something in his voice then, a low, rumbling dare, that she likes, that makes her mouth turn up into a smile.

She follows him.

“Rachel—”

She turns back toward her dad, but only to shake her head. Kopus is right. If she’s choosing sides, then she belongs on this one. Junior takes her hand, smiles a little. She returns it, then hunches over to smile at the baby too.

This session is only a hearing, to see if the case will even go to trial at all. Still, half the town’s showed up, and there’s a palpable feeling of tension in the air, before the judge enters and everyone has to stand together. That moment between her dad and the Lenape man, that moment between her dad and Kopus, that had been controlled, however close to the edge they’d gotten. As soon as everyone’s sitting again, it roars back in, almost thick enough to choke on. This is what it’s going to be like until the end of the trial. Maybe later, too, depending on the outcome—or maybe that doesn’t matter one way or the other. People are going to be angry, whatever the judge decides.

The judge decides there is going to be a trial.

Before she’s even halfway through the sentence the entire courtroom erupts, half in furious joy, the other just in anger, and it takes three whole minutes of gavel pounding and threats to get everyone to quiet down again. “This is going to be a long trial,” the judge says, “and this is a small town. Things will probably get ugly; they usually do. But remember that your neighbors are your neighbors, and _please_ don’t do anything that will bring you before me for anything but what I was called here to deliberate on today. I’m sure I’ll see you all in the courtroom for that, at least. Good day.”

People are either very quick to leave, or very slow; the Lenape linger, and so does Rachel’s dad and a lot of the other policemen. One of them, a clean-cut, handsome guy the others knot up around, keeps shooting her dad indecipherable looks, and eventually he goes to talk to them.

As soon as his back is turned, Rachel slips out of the courtroom. The atmosphere there is stifling, and she needs to breathe, but it’s hardly better out in the foyer. The space is crowded, and since Junior disappeared into the bathroom with the baby, she feels at a bit of a loss until she sees Kopus, leaning against a pillar with his arms crossed, people watching. Or, surveilling them. Waiting, maybe, for a fight to break out. Rachel weaves through the crowd toward him, not trying to hide but unsurprised when he sees her coming. 

“How you feeling?” she asks when she reaches him.  
   
He raises an eyebrow. “That your way of asking if I’m hungover? ’Cause I’m not.”  
   
“No, I just meant… you know. Generally.”  
   
“How are _you_ feeling?”  
   
“I’m starting to understand why my dad hates you.” She tries not to smile, but can’t quite manage it. Instead she leans against the pillar beside him and puts the side of her head against it. Closes her eyes for a moment, and then opens them again. The voices aren’t loud, but they echo, and she can’t make out what any of them are saying. “Do you think you’ll win?”  
   
“Yeah. But it’s gonna be a goddamn bloodbath in the meantime.” He’s crossed his arms, and stares at the crowd, a forty-sixty mix of whites and Lenape, everyone angry. Rachel feels it simmering in the air; it makes the hairs on her arms stand up. “And what are we gonna do afterward anyway, huh?” Kopus asks. Not her—maybe that feeling in the room. “You can’t clean up that shit. It’s in the earth. And these people can’t go anywhere else.”  
   
“Aren’t they your people too?”  
   
“Well, Mac disenrolled me.” He says it like it’s supposed to be a joke. “So, no.” He’s not looking at the crowd anymore. His gaze on her is like a heavy coat thrown over her shoulders, a warm thing she has to tug at to keep on. “You should get out of here.”

She smiles. “What, and miss out on all this?”

“I’m serious. Go to the city. Make a life for yourself outside of this shithole. I would, if I could, if I didn’t have this goddamn—” He lifts his foot a little to indicate the tracking anklet he still wears. “You were there in the courtroom; you saw how much to shit this town is gonna go in the next few years. You really wanna stick around for that?”

“Shouldn’t I?” How to tell him. How to say that she doesn’t want a glamorous life, or even one where she’s rich and renowned. She had, once. Not anymore. Now her needs and desires are smaller. Safety. Security. Someone to sleep beside her in the night. And it’s not the same thing as pinning her hopes on a boy, even a boy she loves; it’s simpler than that, and purer too. “I think I can lead a life here that’s worth living,” she says eventually. Then she shrugs. “And I think maybe that you already have, no matter what you say.”

He lets out an incredulous huff, his eyebrows going up. “ ’Scuse me?”

“Sky? You two aren’t together?”

“I—oh come on, that’s not fair. I’m—“

“A murderer? A former convict? A former drug dealer?” She smiles, just a little. “Old?”

He glances around the room, but no one’s close enough or seems to care at all about what they’re saying to each other, over here by the water fountain. The look Kopus gives her afterward is both angry and a little amused. “Yeah, let’s go with that last one.”

“Rachel.” It’s not Junior, returned from the bathroom—he must be having trouble with the baby—it’s her dad, looking stern and a little angry, but Rachel doesn’t think it’s for her. He gives Kopus a brief nod. “Come on. Your mom’s waiting.”

“Oh, shit, right.” She gathers her things back up. Her bag, the nice shoes she stepped out of the second she stopped walking. “Tell Junior I’ll stop by later today? And let me know if you need anything,” she adds as she turns, looking back over her shoulder. “I want to help.”

He nods, relaxed, watching her go. The door swings shut behind her, obscuring him in a white slide of reflected light, and her heels go _click, click, click_ against the marble stairs as she descends them. Just before the hearing started, Kopus mentioned the first day they met, the night they jumped in the lake and Kopus’s friend nearly drowned Junior on purpose. She remembers the aseptic burn of the cheap vodka they drank, how it settled warm and clean in her stomach. She’d been so young then. She hadn’t known anything. 

She follows her dad out to the black and white, puts her foot on the step and pulls herself up into the passenger’s seat. Her phone pings. It’s Junior.

_wanna get dinner tonight?_

The driver’s side door closes. _sure. the diner?_

_i was thinking maybe we could cook_

She smiles as she thinks of it: _as long as we wont be cooking squirrel_

_pasta?_

_See you at 5:30 : )_

She thumbs the screen dark again and drops it in her bag—her dad shoots her a look she knows, a look that says, don’t be so careless with something I paid for. Rachel rolls her eyes, but only to make him smile.

“You’re just like your mom,” he says. Today the words don’t feel like an accusation, or a threat, or something to live down, and Rachel puts her head back against the seat and closes her eyes, feeling the town rush past outside the window, the air cold, the world descending at last into full winter. Next year it will get hot again, so hot they’ll forget they own coats, and Rachel will go about in her shirtsleeves and short shorts, her palm sticking to Junior’s as they walk through the long grass up on the mountain. The trial will end on a day that feels like one long held breath.

It’s the lake she sees, when she opens her eyes. The air is night-dark and still, but as she watches, the water ripples. A head breaks the surface, then broad shoulders, elbows, hands cutting the water. He steps toward her, his clothes and hair wet, and his eyes are dark and they’re saying, Come on now, you aren’t scared, are you? Only somehow it’s his voice saying it, even though his lips aren’t moving. It’s in her head. And it’s true. Rachel isn’t scared. She breathes, and meets his gaze, and stretches out her hand.


End file.
